In the 1850s, the wave of violence that followed cholera crashed upon Muslims, in particular, pilgrims on Hajj. Muslim religious stricture requires that all practitioners perform the Hajj pilgrimage to Arafat, about twelve miles east of the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, at least once in their lives.23 As the pace of international trade and shipping picked up, so did the number of Hajjis. In 1831, 112,000 pilgrims participated in Hajj; by 1910, an estimated 300,000 did.24 Cholera outbreaks followed as well. In one of the worst outbreaks, in 1865, cholera killed fifteen thousand Hajj pilgrims.
